language wants to escape itself, even as we
want to escape ourselves. language’s means is silence, ours technology. but
silence and technology are bound similarly to language and the human.
even as i cannot consider the human an expert
commentator on itself – but only one voice among many, hardly privileged
because it tends to be perceived to be located on some inside and the inside
perceived to possess in some sense superior perception – so i cannot consider
myself an expert commentator on myself. yet we – and i – cannot help comment.
the gap between this cannot consider
and cannot help is a charter of
writing. yet most writing comes from the cannot
help.
when we say the external world doesn’t exist
– or that it exists solely or primarily as a function of imagination – we point
to maps of spaces of writing. for writing re-enters voids not to create worlds
about which it is debated whether they are illusory or real but to create
spaces that might point to maps, so making any discussion of existence and
non-existence, their locus or non-locus, moot.
we don’t have to create another world, through
politics or technology. that other world is here, already, in language – all we
have to do is enter it, although the policies and procedures for immigration are never explicit and always morphing.
do i write in privacy and loneliness? i enter
privacy and loneliness – or at least the porches of the cottages of their names.
then writing happens. writing is the odd breath of souls loosened in the
unsegmented world.
writing! a dialogue with mirrors’ mute flat
infinity.
to trek through writing’s dense empty
forests, the only respites deserts and carnivals, is to become so used to
nomadic minimalism and survivalist ingenuities that i confuse life and those
techniques required to navigate writing’s environment.
writing is violence, but a violence so
processed by violence violence destroys itself and only writing remains.
nothing here, he says,
after having purchased an excursion package to writing. but writing is a
selective mute.
writing? an empty boat on a river, unmoored,
drifting, unseen, in which time may have ridden once, its traces smelly, like a
deep navel never cleaned?
writing subverts itself. so that in the end –
though there is no end – it gives up itself. what is left? a useless
acquiescent subversion? questions of the methodologies of giving up? atonal
memories? convalescence? palliation? a wellness that refuses its name? these
are questions of death, of the root of the religious quest, where neither
spirit’s presence nor absence can claim ascendancy and its mutability presents
itself in objectifications, its mockery in reifications, its incommunicability
in subjectifications. am i not seduced by writing as its voids are passable
simulations of death and so hold the eternally lost key to life?
